Just Another Cynical Love Story

white lightning flash in a hot spinning night-time of the first kiss as it lands shipwreck-beached on the deserted shores of evening a soft aggressive contact in the dusk

* * * * *
a shared hard-to-let flat in the concrete third world of some storm-tossed inner-city ..... wooden blinkers on the see-no-evil gaze of boarded-up windows where glass has never been ..... black mould and grey mould and green mould and a smell of damp carpets and long dead cigarettes .....

* * * * *

he came into the 40 watt room with the cheap taste of low pubs in his mouth and found you talking with the others

you were introduced and - winded by your body-blow beauty - he forgot your name before the sound of it had drowned in the dampness of the walls

he swore at himself for being drunk - for being beyond the circling reach of your conversation

through his stupor’s pulsating black void he watched you shine to the music of the autumn lights and blamed the beer and the brandy for falling in love

the others had gone to bed before he realised you were staying overnight and he made an ugly effort to sober up - his frog-bulge stare trying to fix full focal length on anything that couldn’t move

his unhooked fishtongue died flapping at the baked dirtedge pool of his mouth as he tried to speak - to say something that might make you talk to him

his world spun ever faster to the tune of your laughter until the speed reached its limit when his slurring fell away and finally you could talk together and laugh and smoke cigarette after cigarette until both packets lay empty and you knew you were on the edge and looking down

and the kiss landed with the determined stealth of the sea

and your tongues exchanged their secrets

and his hands were in your hair

and your arms around his neck might never let him go

and fragments burst in starshowered brilliance to sprinkle your passion with his perfect love

and fragments burst in starshowered brilliance to sprinkle his passion with your perfect love

and you went to bed

alone

the hammer of his guilt beat against your softly fragile youth and he knew you deserved more than his drunken adoring fumbling so he left you to the wasteland of your single bed while he went to his own room sadly feasting on the yeastwarm tang of your virgin lips

* * * * *

You take him water in the morning as he lies crucified beneath a fourteen year hangover.

“More?” you ask as he lowers the glass from his lips.

He nods without speaking. He knows his voice would be the flat cracked baritone of an Orphean love song to the dead. He closes his eyes wondering if his breath smells nearly as bad as it tastes.

You come back and sit on the desert of his bed while he empties the second glass.

“You’re a shit,” you say, your hands moulding castles on the dunes of the duvet beside his knees. You want to say more, to open the floodgates and deluge his suffering with your own. But you’re not sure you can control the undercurrent of real emotion you feel welling inside you.

He looks at you from the bottom of a half-litre of whiskey and he knows he’s a shit. He wonders if your reasons for thinking it are the same as his and he doubts it.

He feels he has centrespread eyes and closes them against the possibility. He can remember drinking with your husband long after you had gone to bed ..... sharing middle-aged dreams of yesterday’s future ..... protesting ..... confirming ..... laughter and promises ..... vast blank chasms .....

“Feeling better? you ask, hoping you sound sarcastic with the I-don’t-care of someone else’s wife. Your hands lie still now, truth-naked except for the ring which you wish you had taken off. They rest on the warm quilt and you think how this is the substance of fourteen years: the thickness of a duvet, the lifetime of forever .....

You take the glass from his trembling hands and put it on the floor beside the bed as he looks at you more closely than you want, seeing the same girl of his oh-so-long-ago kiss. Only much more beautiful now.

You want to look away but for a long moment you stare into his eyes without expression. Your own eyes are burnished dark and lust-bright with loathing. He takes one of your hands in his and you are surprised at how tightly you hold him. He strokes your fingers and brings them to his lips .....

You say, “Don’t,” but the sound has no strength and you pull back your hand only when he takes one of your fingers into his mouth.

“Please,” you say, lowering your eyes to where your hardlocked grasp writhes in your lap. You feel your own heat radiating through your jeans and behind his shield of whiskey fumes you sense the same heat rising in him. Eighteen inches ..... fourteen years ..... two lifetimes ..... The distance between you stretches like razorwire until you think it might snap, until you know it must snap and .....

He falls back against the pillow and the spell is broken.

“I love you,” he says. “I always have and you know it.”

His voice is as quiet and dead as the breeze in a photograph and you know what he says is the truth and you wonder if he said it or if you said it but you don’t care whether or not he loves you because of the fourteen years.

“Shut up,” you whisper in a red twist of uncertainty, daring yourself but holding back.

He touches your perfect cheek with the scraps of his fingertips and you lift your eyes to him once more. You say nothing but he listens to the dark suns of your eyes as they set below the horizon of their tears and he knows you are fighting the silence and fighting what lies behind that silence with your lip-lost mouth gouging a deep scratch on polished steel. When he touches your ear you flinch, hoping he won’t draw your face to his ..... hoping he won’t ..... wanting him to ..... And you despise him for your weakness.

“If you come to bed we can talk about it,” he says. But you can’t see his smile because your eyes are closed.

There is a screaming in your ears which you hope is only on the inside and you are shaking your head more violently than you want but you can’t stop.

“Hey,” he says softly, the sigh of skin-brushed silk. “Hey, I’m joking. Come on.”

He raises your head with a finger under your chin and you grab his hand and kiss the backs of his fingers with a greed which denies his words and almost makes him speak the one-way street of his heart.

But you speak instead. From somewhere near to drowning you break the surface and emerge into the light of safety in triumph over your own desire and his desire and ..... your husband’s desire, if only you knew it.

“Leave me alone,” you say. And you look him in the eyes again and your tears have gone, dried by the heat of your sudden anger. “You don’t know how dangerous you are.”

He reads the pity and contempt on your face and knows you think he is playing with you. Only your still holding his hand so tightly prevents him from using harsh words.

“Love is dangerous,” he says, “not me.” And his voice is sad in the knowledge that your misplaced morality is ultimately unshakeable.

“Love is dangerous because it makes us behave the way we really are. We lose control and we can’t always cope with that. So we deny love. I love you very much.”

“Don’t, please.” Black and white, hysteria’s disc-flat circles spin towards vertigo in the hollowness of your stomach. You still have his hand in yours but you want your nails in his flesh, your teeth in his flesh, the taste of his blood on your tongue.

“I don’t believe you,” you say, even though you do believe him because he is speaking for you as well as for himself. “I don’t believe you because you love whoever you’re with at the time. You lie in your love and I could never trust you.”

Your words thrust holes through the morning’s flimsy skin and he feels the many shades of his pain seeping out into no-hiding-place of the day.

He knows that what you say is no more than inspired self-protection but he also knows his mistake is old and immovable, crusted over by the coral of conversations which never took place.

* * * * *

sunday lunchtime the day after you’d met - six hours after he had tasted the moon on your breath and bathed your vulnerability in the tears of his loss

you sit in the dim quiet of a public bar with three or four friends and irrelevant drinks on the table

he sees only you and tries not to make a fool of himself

he was hung over then too and lit a cigarette to calm his rattling hands but he was sucking the sodden fur of a ship’s cat and crushed it out in the ashtray

two seats away you were cool and distant and avoided looking in his direction

he thought this was a denial and let the accumulation of his whole life conspire against the single silver truth of himself - let all the falseness of convention overwhelm and subdue that one thing that was his desire

instead he watched you leave the pub to drive back to the coast and your safe life and he drank the bitter grief of his beer through the chewed unspoken words of his yearning

you left he watched

his mistake was made in doing nothing

he found your phone number in his flatmate’s address book but couldn’t bring himself to dial it for all the bastard reasons of doubt and insecurity conjured by your averted gaze

shortly afterwards life changed

he moved away to the north although he thought of you in the darkness of his nights as you remembered him for a while like the smile of a stranger in a dream

and the next time you met you were a married woman

* * * * *

Your argument works only because your ears are stopped against him.

“It only holds true from your position.” He knows you won’t listen but he owes it to himself so he says it anyway. “I’m bound to seem to love whoever I’m with at the time because when you see that, I’m with you. So it’s true. When you’re not there, you can’t see that I don’t love whoever is.”

His voice has risen a little and you glance towards the door. You can hear your husband moving about downstairs in the kitchen and you wonder just what you are doing sitting on this bed holding the hand of your never-lover while the man you are married to (and who you love who you love) makes tea and noise against the background sounds of your voices. If only it could .....

“Also,” relentless word-mill of lies, of truth, of you don’t know what. “I never realised ..... You never-”

“Did I need to?” You spit the words with a cracked glass frown on your perfect brow as if the question was born in a film you’ve never seen.

He doesn’t answer and his silence makes it difficult to think.

“If only the world would stop for three weeks,” you say, hot salt blinding your eyes. “If only we could have three weeks together.”

“Three weeks?” He laughs - but gently because he has just now understood that you don’t understand. “I’m not talking about a fling,” he says with patience, his words smoothing the creases on the crumpled bedsheet of your thinking. His fingers tighten around your grateful hand. “I love you enough for the world to stop for three centuries.”

Without listening, you hear the sounds of his words. You are already three weeks away. You absently reach out to pluck a tiny hair from his chest as you think how you would feel for those three weeks. Only his sudden stillness brings you back to what you have just done and you lean towards him to kiss the invisible wound with a magic potency that explodes at the base of his skull. Your lips linger for an instant to prolong this, the third kiss, as you consider .....

You turn your slow-motion head and rest your cheek against his chest and slide your hand over the whiskey-reeking surface of his skin in a caress which is the closest you can come to surrender.

You know the emotion between you is undeniable and destructive. It must be nailed to resolve’s unyielding board with rods of fortitude ..... But not yet. You stroke his chest and circle his nipple with abandoned fingertips safe in the knowledge that your time will soon run out.

His hand is on your face, moving over your face like the blush of guilt which is already there. And he nuzzles in the fragrance of your hair, dreaming you and wanting you and crying inside for the lost moments past and the lost moments to come, feeling your cruel touch on him and knowing that you could never see that cruelty because you think he is too hard to hurt and too insensitive to care.

You lie against him for twelve minutes as the red seconds hand of the alarm-clock winds through the morning while he tries to insinuate himself deeper into your thoughts, telling you that it’s all true, that whether you like it or not, neither of you can ever escape.

When you sit up there’s a redness around your eyes which will fade before lunch.

“You’d better get up,” you say. “You’ve made a ruin of my life.”

As you stand you lean over him once more and touch his forehead with your lips in a kiss as soft as the shadow of a moth’s wing before you leave the bedroom without looking back.